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Moira Walker

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  1. The science is clear: pitch-black surfaces from curb to curb increase the heat. CITY OF VICTORIA WORK CREWS and their vehicles have filled my city block for the last couple of weeks. Mine is a long block and new turquoise pipes are being installed in order to address an aging water system. To complete this work, a corridor of pavement has been picked up. When the job is completed in the next few weeks, I want the City to reseal the corridor but not repave the entire block. Why? Won’t it beautify the street to have a fresh-looking road of new blacktop? While fresh blacktop may look pretty and neat to some, it doesn’t to me. As someone who walks a lot in my neighbourhood, I know the difference between my block with older, weathered blacktop and two nearby blocks with new pitch-black surfaces from curb to curb. The difference? Heat. And a whole lot of it. The contrast between the blocks is not a feeling or a whim or an idle fancy of mine. There is science behind the difference, and US cities are already involved in an attempt to make blacktop less black. In late spring 2023, city crews in San Antonio, Texas, applied five different products to thousand-foot sections of road across the city. As reported in a July 2023 Globe and Mail article, the idea was to lighten the black asphalt so that it reflected back the sun’s rays rather than absorbed all of the heat. The result? Cooler roads. The work was timely. This summer San Antonio smashed heat records, temperatures climbing 66 times to 37.8 degrees Celsius. The technology of road “lightening” has been likened to sunscreen for streets. Its formal name is “cool pavement.” It is not cheap, but the science is sound. Research studies at Arizona State University and the City of Phoenix, as reported in a 2021 Scientific American article, show an application of “reflective, gray-colored emulsion material” to black asphalt results in a temperature of drop 2.4 degrees Celsius. Phoenix is just another US city involved in the work to lighten its blacktop in attempt to ameliorate rising temperatures. Rather than have the City of Victoria back fit my street at some point with a “sunscreen” when our City breaks too many more heat records, I have an ask. Please leave my old road topping—which has greyed over time—as it is. Mend the road by simply covering the seam left by the excavation. Honour the science. Do the right thing and don’t completely resurface my block. Allow the children, the adults, and the dogs on my street to sing our gratitude to you for protecting us from unnecessary heat. Moira Walker, MFA, is a retired Camosun College instructor. An oral storyteller, she’s told stories at The Flame, UNO Festival, and Royal BC Museum.
  2. Two giant sequoias, that have witnessed our city’s evolution, appear at risk from an impending development. TWO STATELY SEQUOIAS that may be 130 years old and are about 20 metres tall stand behind Thrifty Foods on Menzies Street in James Bay. If you look at their bark, one has some burn damage; both have been subject to the attention of woodpeckers. According to a forest ecologist who recently examined them, the trees are healthy. Given the lifespan of these giants is from 1000 to 3500 years, he thinks they may have many more years before them. But do they? Recently, the area around their roots has been compromised by the placement of a skirt of paving stones, limiting their access to water, according to a forest ecologist. But more troublesome is that the trees stand on land slated to be repurposed. An application to place about 100 units on the site is before the planning department—Development Services— right now. While a City planner has given his assurance that the trees will be “unaffected,” could they still be in danger? Developers aren’t particularly fond of trees, especially large ones. The two sequoias, near Thrifty Foods, on Menzies These trees have witnessed so much. They must not be felled. The trees might have been part of a shipment of sequoias brought from California in 1889 by Robert P. Rithet, a one-time mayor of Victoria and wealthy businessman with commercial ties to San Francisco. Rithet oversaw the planting of 2,000 trees, 50 of which were Giant sequoias, in Beacon Hill Park. If they were planted by 1890, they would have been here when electric streetcar service began in Victoria on February 22. According to a 1902 map, Route 3, which originated in Fernwood, passed the trees, and turned east off Menzies Street onto Niagara Street before stopping at Beacon Hill Park. According to the 1891 census, Victoria had become a city of 16,841 people with 55 hotels and taverns. The five streetcar lines became a popular means of moving about the city. The trees may have been here for the 1892 smallpox epidemic, but they definitely were here for the 1911 diphtheria epidemic and for the three waves of the 1918 to 1920 Spanish flu. Certainly, the trees were here when the CPR Empress Hotel opened in 1908 and when a road to Mill Bay named Malahat Drive was built in 1911. They’d have witnessed with incredulity the scramble on New Year’s Day 1922 when cars on Vancouver Island switched to the right side of the road so as to be in keeping with the rest of the province and Canada. In 1915, the trees would have observed people in Victoria searching for an additional penny before boarding the streetcar. Fares, which had just been raised from a nickel to six cents, were paid to the conductor once on board. In 1917, a bird perched atop the trees would have seen the completion of the Ogden breakwater and the following year would probably have been able to see the opening in Saanich of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, which housed the largest telescope of its kind in the world. On October 2, 1921, over 5,000 people gathered along Shelbourne Street from Mount Douglas Park to Bay Street. On that day, the trees witnessed the planting of a memorial avenue of 600 London plane trees, one for each soldier from the greater Victoria area who died in WWI. British Columbia lost 6,000 soldiers in that war. Sadly, the trees have also witnessed in recent years the work of so-called developers: they have cut down 400 of those commemorative trees. The James Bay trees may have been commemorative trees too. Over a hundred years ago, visiting dignitaries often selected sequoias to plant in Victoria. The trees’ growing root system would have been shaken December 7, 1918, by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake off the West Coast of Vancouver Island. They’d have paused in wonder when in 1925 a stately pleasure-dome opened on Douglas Street near Bellville Street: The CPR Crystal Gardens with its heated saltwater pool, the largest in the British Empire, and two ballroom-dance floors. In 1937, the trees witnessed the beginning of a new city tradition: hanging flower baskets affixed to light standards. The soil mixture remains the same in the baskets hung in 2021. The two trees have seen so much. The word “sequoia,” the name of the Menzies Street trees, was coined by an Austrian linguist and botanist, Stephen L. Endlicher, as both a descriptor of the plant genus and a way of honouring Sequoyah (1767-1843), the man who created the written form of the Cherokee language. Actual settlers, these trees occur naturally only in groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California. Scientifically, the two Menzies Street trees are Sequoiadendron giganteum, but John Muir, the Scottish-US naturalist and writer who cofounded the Sierra Club and is said to be the “father” of US National Parks, affectionately called them Big Trees. Sequoias, in fact, are the most massive trees on Earth. In 2011, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it, named the sequoias an endangered species, with fewer than 80,000 remaining. The 2020 and 2021 fires in California, coupled with fire suppression, drought, and climate destruction, resulted in the loss of up to 13,640 mature trees. Speaking about his Big Trees, John Muir said, “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.” For Garry Merkel, a member of the Tahltan Nation and a forester, the problem is that “We’re managing ecosystems—that are in some cases thousands of years old—on a four-year political cycle.” And for Jens Wieting, a senior forest and climate campaigner who has crunched the numbers, “We are currently losing about 10,000 hectares a year—that’s the old-growth logging rate—on Vancouver Island.” How do we ensure the sequoias of Menzies Street are still here to see the end of the current pandemic and remain standing when your great-grandchild skips by them to cast a fishing line off Ogden Point or to watch a kite rise above her head on the grassy verge between Dallas Road and the Strait of Juan de Fuca? The new paving stones near one of the sequoias. Well, that’s up to you and me. We can speak for these two trees. We can call City Hall. We can ask that the newly placed skirt of paving stones near their roots be removed. We can take our grandchildren to stand before them and tell them about all the trees have seen and all the carbon they’ve caught and will continue to catch, if we only let them. We can witness the trees’ existence just as they have witnessed ours. We can find our voices and speak for them. We can insist they are settlers who must be allowed to stay. We can become their keepers. We can do all this. We can. Moira Walker is a retired Camosun College instructor. An oral storyteller, she’s told stories at The Flame, UNO Festival, and Royal BC Museum. She recently completed an MFA from the University of King’s College in Halifax, NS.
  3. Thoughts about “disposable” masks and other litter collected on Victoria’s streets. I DON’T PICK UP CONDOMS. David Sedaris does. I began the practice of picking up litter years ago and redoubled my refuse gathering after reading about Sedaris’s efforts around the countryside at his home in Surrey, England. Compared to Sedaris, I’m a dilettante. Sedaris sets out with a metal stick with a grabber at the end, a garbage bag, and a Fitbit. He walks for hours, picking up everything. He even plucks condoms from hedgerows. After years of toil, he’s been honoured by having his name placed on a garbage truck. His is one of the cleanest areas in England because of his work. Returning with my family from a seemingly litter-filled Midwest of the US to Canada in 1970, I was glad to be restored to a landscape free of misplaced rubbish. Later when I began teaching, I had my students read an amusing essay by the New York writer Russell Baker in which he wonders at Toronto cab drivers who quote Shakespeare and at streets free of the disfiguration of garbage. In his 1979 article “Nice Place to Visit,” Baker writes, “It seems never to have occurred to anybody in Toronto that garbage exists to be heaved into the streets. One can drive for miles without seeing so much as a banana peel in the gutter or a discarded newspaper whirling in the wind.” But no more. Now litter swirls across my hometown of Victoria, clogging up storm sewers and adorning cypress hedges. Before the pandemic, the City tried to ban plastic bags. But the Canadian Plastic Bag Association challenged the ban in BC’s top court, and the City lost. Its appeal of the ruling was rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada. Until the courts issued their judgement, trees and streets around my local grocery store were momentarily liberated from white-balloon- and flag-like forms entangled in vegetation and hanging from overhead wires. Now we are again awash with plastic bags, a product made from oil that ends up as deadly waste. A single plastic bag takes over 500 years to disintegrate in a landfill. It is estimated that plastic bags kill 100,000 marine animals a year. I began picking up garbage years ago. I redoubled my efforts on retiring, becoming fanatically committed to tidying any place I walked, that is, until the mystery disease arrived. With the lockdown last March, I averted my eyes on my daily walks, trying not to see the coffee cups, advertising leaflets, batteries, and pop cans. I tried to train my gaze away from the unsightly. I took routes I thought were less likely to be marked by waste. But there aren’t any. Litter can be found on every street and in every park. The excess reality of our lives spills out all around us. Moira Walker doing her pandemic walk and garbage collection Finally, like everyone, I relaxed into the pandemic. Oh, I still leap aside when I meet anyone on the sidewalk, and I don’t shop for the most part, though I never much did. I have a cloth mask in my coat pocket and another in my purse. I regularly wash them along with my fold-up, recyclable cloth grocery bag. And sometime after the initial lockdown, I began picking up litter again. Paper cups with plastic lids. Plastic straws. Plastic bags of dog poo, sometimes left just beside a city waste can. Empty cigarette packages. Many, many packages. A baby’s “disposable” diaper tossed on the grass boulevard. My neighbourhood is well served by garbage receptacles, which are regularly emptied. But no matter. A certain group of people prefer to drop their waste on the street, rather than keep it in their car, tuck it in their pocket, or use a public garbage can. Since the pandemic, the new item on the street are so-called “disposable” masks, a nightmare land-fill item that combines paper, metal, and polymers. The middle or filtering layer is made up of micro- and nanofibers. These masks are already getting into waterways from which they reach the freshwater and marine environment, adding to the presence of plastics in the water. By 2050, scientists have estimated there’ll be more plastic than fish in the oceans. I try not to get angry when I stoop to pick up these unnecessary masks. Strangers in cars and fellow pedestrians often shout out thanks to me for my outdoor, volunteer janitorial work. I don’t know how to respond to them. I wish people wouldn’t buy half the stuff I pick up. I wish, if they must buy it, they didn’t discard it moments later on our grass verges, streets, and sidewalks. I wish companies were made responsible for harmful, unnecessary packaging they produce. Why, for instance, is a small amount of milk now sold in plastic bottles, rather than a cardboard cartoon? Why did the company that produces Fisherman’s Friend switch from paper enclosures to unfriendly metallic foil packages? In the meantime, my neighbourhood streets are calling me. I still haven’t had a garbage truck named after me. Moira Walker is a retired Camosun College instructor. An oral storyteller, she’s told stories at The Flame, UNO Festival, and Royal BC Museum. She’s about to complete an MFA from the University of King’s College in Halifax, NS.
  4. Image: New street calming installation on Vancouver Street City Hall, while delivering us bike paths, seems to have fallen in love with concrete and black top—and out of love with trees and beauty. Go to story
  5. City Hall, while delivering us bike paths, seems to have fallen in love with concrete and black top—and out of love with trees and beauty. Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone They paved paradise and put up a parking lot —“Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell RECENTLY, I STOPPED TO CHAT with a City of Victoria worker. He’d come with a mate to grind up the roots of a magnificent tree the City had recently cut down. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. Looking at the stump, we knew the tree had been healthy. “Why was it taken down?” I asked. “Don’t know. Could have been the roots were getting into the sewers.” We both looked down the street, which is lined on both sides with large trees. How odd this tree next to the corner lot had to go. Maybe this tree was in the way of a planned development as it was in front of a house that is now for sale. Developers seem to hate trees, so maybe someone acted quickly to get the tree out of the way. It’s not just in my neighbourhood that large trees are disappearing; huge trees are coming down, some in the middle of the night, all over the city. Large trees capture and hold far more carbon than the new slender plantings. The city worker and I then shifted our conversation to the matter of concrete. We agreed a sea of concrete has begun to invade Victoria. Perfectly good curbs have been broken up to be replaced by identical curbs. Sidewalks, for instance, now line the west side of Ross Bay Cemetery and the north edge of May Street, despite there being sidewalks on the other side of the streets that pedestrians would and do favour. And everywhere islands of concrete are appearing in the midst of roadways. We all know trees are an urban solution to slowing traffic, but in Victoria the new solution seems to be blobs concrete. Just one of the re-worked intersections along Vancouver Street. If you haven’t been to Victoria in a dozen years, check out the Victoria entrance to the White (Elephant) Bridge that replaced the Blue Bridge downtown. It is a sea of concrete blobs and black top. New visitors will also note the bicycle lanes—the many, many bike lanes have been placed on streets that were never frequented by bikers. I, like most riders, prefer quiet, back streets. These lanes, a copy of those in London, England, seem to necessitate more concrete, such as the elaborate, vast network of the material seen at the junction of Bay and Vancouver Streets. The City of Victoria won an award for its bike lanes. The trees, the ground, the aesthetically inclined, and the planet itself have paid an enormous price for it. According to the think tank Chatham House, cement, the key ingredient of concrete, is “the source of about eight percent of the world’s carbon dioxide.” Furthermore, it has been estimated that were “the cement industry to be a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world, just behind China and the US.” The present occupants of Victoria City Hall, while delivering us bike paths, seem to have fallen in love with concrete and black top—and out of love with trees and beauty. It’s either that or I worry someone in City Hall has a vested interest we don’t know about. We’ve paved our paradise and, in so doing, we’ve lost it. The city worker told me his ancestors came to Victoria in the 1840s. They fell in love with the city. He now can’t wait to retire. As soon as he does, he and his wife are moving to the interior. They want to reacquaint themselves with trees and see the ground again. I want to go with them. Moira Walker is a retired Camosun College instructor. An oral storyteller, she’s told stories at The Flame, UNO Festival, and Royal BC Museum. She’s about to complete an MFA from the University of King’s College in Halifax, NS.
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